The “Me Too” FAQ

This FAQ is designed to educate, and hopefully change, the ways of certain contributors on various USENET newsgroups. These contributors add nothing of substantial content to USENET, and simply waste bandwidth with their ramblings. These contributors are “Me Too” message posters, and must be destroyed, be it by force or simple reasoning and communication.

                            Maintained by:  Sciri
                            [email protected]
                      http://www.replicacorp.com/~sciri
                                Release 0.01

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00)  Table of Contents
     01)  Introduction
     02)  The Mentality of a "Me Too" Posting
     03)  What is a "Me Too" Post?
     04)  How can we prevent "Me Too" posts?
     05)  How do to find out if a textfile exists?
     06)  Sites of Interest
     07)  Adding to this FAQ


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01)  Introduction

This FAQ is designed to educate, and hopefully change, the ways of certain
contributors on various USENET newsgroups.  These contributors add nothing
of substantial content to USENET, and simply waste bandwidth with their
ramblings.  These contributors are "Me Too" message posters, and must be
destroyed, be it by force or simple reasoning and communication.

With the introduction of Compuserve, America Online, Prodigy, and other
larger general audience services hitting the Internet, USENET has been
flooded with a tsunami of "Me Too" posts.  This, unfortunately, has been
going on for years, but has been growing in an exponential fashion.  This
mentality, usually contained within the megacorp "Information Superhighway"
services, has also been spreading at an alarming rate to smaller Internet
providers and educational institutions.

If you've been emailed this FAQ, then that could mean one of two things.
Either you've been found guilty of posting a USENET message that qualifies
as a "Me Too" post, or someone just thinks that this FAQ is damn cool and
they've forwarded it to you just for the Hell of it.

If you're not guilty of posting a "Me Too" message to USENET, then feel free
to forward this on to anyone else who has.  If you happen to be guilty, then
please read this FAQ repeatedly in detail and get a clue.

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02)  The Mentality of a "Me Too" Posting

From what I've seen, the majority of "Me Too" posts, by far, comes from
America Online.  The reason for this is quite simple.  America Online is the
most "subscribe to me now, in your face, you'll get ten hours free, get on
the Information Superhighway, we'll soak you for all you've got" online
service.  If you have the mentality to use America Online and its cute
little point and click anti-Internet interface, then you really don't want
to search for anything yourself.  After all, America Online hands everything
to you on a little plastic baby spoon, so why shouldn't the Internet?

"Me Too" posters have not learned the basic search engines yet, and have no
desire to.  After all, in their eyes, they're the most important person on
the fact of the earth, and everyone else on the Internet is simply there to
serve their every need and request.

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03)  What is a "Me Too" Post?

A "Me Too" posting is any message posted on a Bulletin Board Service or
USENET Newsgroup that requests a piece of information by quoting someone's
original request for information, and simply stating something along the
lines of "can you send me that too please?"  Some examples of a "Me To"
threads follow:

Wed, 08 Nov 1995 14:23:03           alt.2600                Thread  127 of 797
Lines 2              Re: ->FREE HACKERZ HOW-TO GUIDEFREE HACKERZ HOW-TO GUIDE